Messing with the blues: revisionism comes to the Delta.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues - Book Review

Every casual blues fan has met a hard case, the guy--it is always a guy--who pores over the tiny ads in the back of Goldmine in search of "real" blues recordings. He is the keeper of esoteric sideman knowledge, the arbiter of notes bent and pre-bent, and sadly in need of being told to give it a rest.

In Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2004), Elijah Wald seems like he's out to take the stuffy blues purists down a notch or two with a fresh look at the received history of the blues. But despite his impressive scholarship and obvious love of the material, Wald winds up substituting, ones, which is not quite the improvement it could be.

Wald's central theme is that, far from being an obscure folk tradition rescued by Alan Lomax and other white field recodists, blues was thriving, diverse popular music. Wald also expands on the recent welcome trend of knocking down the walls between different styles of music, revealing that musicians, black and white, country and urban, freely stole from one another for decades, to everyone's benefit.

Wald uses artists' recording histories as a guide to their popularity and influence. This approach reflects the extent to which records were a transmission belt for popular culture as far back as the 1920s and '30s. (It also reminds us that fads are nothing new, as the spate of "Black Snake" songs--"That Black Snake Moan," "New Black Snake Blues," "That Black Snake Moan Number 2"--attests.) Wald tries to throttle the misconception that black artists were Godgifted but wild natives rather than practiced musicians with wide influences, experiences, and audiences. Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy in particular, Wald notes, were inaccurately branded Negro bumpkins. Sources as mainstream as Life spread this notion with such pieces as a Leadbelly feature titled "Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel."

But Wald's reliance on record sales soon leads him to equate cutting records with musical influence and standing. This is where the guitarist Robert Johnson comes in. Johnson never sold much of anything while he was alive, so Wald concludes Johnson does not matter as much as blues fans suppose. "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure," he claims, "and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note."

That seems an awfully strong statement, one which requires...